Chapter 1113
Over the course of his life, Anton had visited hundreds of stars. That was more than most, certainly, but in the grand scheme of things it was… very small. In a single galaxy there were hundreds of billions of stars. Even in the tiny section of the galaxy that they called home, stretching far enough so that the great powers in the upper realms could not reach beyond, there were millions.
If Anton somehow managed to visit one per day- which would have been far beyond a sustainable pace- it would take him thousands of years to even get close to a single million. This was a project completely out of his grasp.
And he liked that. His individual contribution would be negligible. He couldn’t be in more than one place at a time, and even his bound stars didn’t have perfect perception around them. This was a task that would be taken up by many others… including some of the more recent successes in the field of Starbinding.
Despite Anton’s best efforts, not all of those who made the attempt were successful. They ended up like he had, a charred husk, but without the ultimate success that allowed them to recover. Other more conservative methods of Assimilation were more successful.
One of the starbinding cultivators was from Rutera- and more relevantly was not part of the Order. An ambitious fellow named Ujarak who had been part of the eastern war as a Life Transformation cultivator took inspiration in the best way. He had seen Ocreaf surrounded by its massive shell, and had thought that there could be something better.
Over the last decade, he’d constructed a few small platforms with the help of others. Then he had taken them to a small, unstable star to try his hand at a project. Anton had been present to watch as the technology provided a minor but still very real boost to the star’s stability. But that wasn’t good enough for Ujarak. He wanted to be part of the process, and tied himself to the platforms with an ingenious piece of technology.
From all accounts he was as close to perfectly successful as possible- though he would admit himself that if his calculations were off by as much as a single percent he would not have survived the process. He didn’t have a direct conduit to the star inside of him, but the device synchronized him and the star Striul.
As ambitious as the fellow was, he recognized his limitations. To bind another star, he would need to find one that could sync up with Striul properly. The man had set up a permanent residence there as one of the many staking out positions for themselves. Ujarak wasn’t in any hurry to bind his second star, instead happily letting his cultivation improve in the new tier a little bit at a time.
There were more stories of people than the stars they spread to, stories both big and small. Some took their positions as a temporary task. They intended to stay a decade or two, living alone or in small groups before seeking replacements. Significant resources were invested to those willing to commit their time.